A Storm Raged - A Friend is Lost

I awoke to the sounds of the raging storm. The crack of the lightning, roll of the thunder, and gush of water as the heavens wept. I had been warned of its coming, but still its fierceness surprised me as broke over my home.

Seventy-five miles away another storm raged, but this storm would rage longer,…lingering over the lives of people I work with and love. Like the flash of lightning on a cloudless day, word came a friend was in the hospital, his life hanging in the balance. I was not there, but I could sense the severity of the storm in the voices that trembled on the phone, the agonizing hours that passed with no word of his progress, the hope against hope that a miracle would happen and the sun would split the clouds of fear that hovered over his wife and two young daughters.

The storm crested, but a drizzle of sorrow remains. Unanswerable whys soak hearts of those left without a husband, a father, a son, a friend. Life will go on, but today, those closest to the loss don't know how. Where shock and fear and hope were mingled as the storm raged, tears now fall like rain from a sorrow saturated sky.

The loss they feel draws me back to the losses I've experienced in recent days; My daughter-in-law's brother taken in young life, my father on a New Year's morning, my Grandmother a month shy of her 100th birthday. There are holes in my heart that will never be filled.

Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, these storms take us to a place we never expected or to places we feared; a forest of sorrow, the wilderness without our loved one. "In the middle of the journey of our life," Dante wrote in his Inferno, "I found myself in a dark wood."

In Windows of the Soul, Ken Gire explained it this way:

"…the trees were so dense and their shadows so long that I didn't know how to get out--or if I ever would get out. That was the fear. Not of the darkness of the woods. Not the dangers in the shadows. But that the woods may never end. . . . I feared too for someone I lived whose life had also ended up in the woods, lost too, but in a different way. I wanted with all my heart to help but found myself of all people the least capable of doing it."

I'm not as close to the one taken as others are. I am not family, in a literal sense, but I have been included in the "family" who was called as the storm struck and raged. And I am family with those who grieve and will grieve in the days ahead. My tears will come when I see the faces of those who now have an empty place that my friend filled with his love and his laughter. I pray I will strong enough to weep with those who weep, to be a comfort on their journey into a dark wood.